in a Diverse Context
Since 2000, Canada has become a world leader in its sustained strategy of professionally-driven reform of its education system. Not only do its students perform well, they perform well despite their socio-economic status, first language or whether they are native Canadians or recent immigrants. Canada has achieved success within a highly federated system, which features significant diversity, particularly with respect to issues of language and country of origin. This chapter takes an in-depth look at Canada’s success, taking the case study of the nation’s largest province, Ontario.
It shows how consistent application of centrally-driven pressure for higher results, combined with extensive capacity building and a climate of relative trust and mutual respect, have enabled the Ontario system to achieve progress on key indicators, while maintaining labour peace and morale throughout the system.
intrOduCtiOn
canada is a relative latecomer to the top of the international rankings. unlike Japan and Korea, it was not a clear leader in international assessments in the 1980s and 1990s, and it was only after the release of the PiSa rankings in 2000 that canada found itself a leader of the pack (table 3.1). these results have been confirmed in subsequent PiSa tests, which have revealed that canada has both strong average results as well as less dispersion among its high and low socio-economic status (SeS) students than many other nations (oecd, 2010).
understanding the factors behind this strong performance is not easy for two reasons. first, canadian education is governed at the provincial level; the federal role is limited, and sometimes non-existent. thus each of the 10 provinces and 3 territories has its own history, governance structure and educational strategy. Second, because canada is a newcomer to educational success, there has not yet been the array of visitors, scholars, and other interested observers who could generate the kind of secondary literature which tells a story of canadian success as a whole. given those limitations, this report tries to balance breadth and depth by describing the features of the system and the relatively little that is known about the reasons for the success of canadian education as a whole, coupled with an in-depth look at the recent educational strategy of the nation’s largest province, ontario.
Table 3.1 Canada’s mean scores on reading, mathematics and science scales in piSa
PISA 2000 PISA 2003 PISA 2006 PISA 2009
mean score mean score mean score mean score
Reading 534 528 527 524
Mathematics 532 527 527
Science 534 529
Source: oecd (2010), PISA 2009 Results: What Students Know and Can Do: Student Performance in Reading, Mathematics and Science (Volume I), oecd Publishing.
1 2 http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/888932366655
this report aims to spur further investigations into the work of additional provinces, which would allow for a more definitive assessment of the reasons for canadian success in future years. this question is especially important because canada has achieved success within a highly federated system, which features significant diversity, particularly with respect to issues of language and country of origin. given that many of the other PiSa leaders are relatively small and culturally homogenous countries, canada could provide a model of how to achieve educational success in a large, geographically dispersed, and culturally heterogeneous country.
tHe Canadian eduCatiOn SyStem
as mentioned above, the most striking feature of the canadian system is its decentralisation. it is the only country in the developed world that has no federal office or department of education. education is the responsibility of its 10 provinces and 3 territories. four of those provinces hold approximately 80% of canada’s 5 million students:
ontario (2 million), Quebec (1 million), British columbia (610 000) and alberta (530 000).
responsibility within the provinces is divided between the central provincial government and more locally-elected school boards. the provincial government is responsible for setting the curriculum, determining many major policies for schools and providing the majority, if not all, of the funding for schools (funding patterns vary slightly across provinces). the minister of education is chosen by the premier from elected members of the provincial legislature, and becomes a member of the ruling party’s cabinet. the deputy minister is a civil servant, who carries much of the operational responsibility for the workings of the department. tensions can exist between the civil servants in the province’s department of education, who generally by training and inclination are sympathetic to the views of educators, and elected officials who may have a broader reform agenda.
local school boards are elected. they employ staff and appoint principals and senior administrators. they also set annual budgets and make decisions on some programmes. over time, the number of districts has shrunk considerably through consolidation processes. in alberta, for example, there were historically more than 5 000 districts, which by the end of the 20th century had been consolidated to less than 70. there is no interim level of administration between the provinces and districts in canada – provinces and districts work directly with one another on province-wide initiatives.
teachers are unionised in canada, and the unit of collective bargaining varies across provinces – some bargain at the local level, some at the provincial level, and some are mixed. teacher training takes place in universities, although the standards for certification have traditionally been set by the provinces. in 1987, British columbia was the first to make its teachers self-governing, granting to the British columbia college of teachers exclusive responsibility for governing entry, discipline, and professional development of teachers. in 1996, ontario followed suit, creating an ontario college of teachers which governs similar functions; on its 31 member governing council sit 17 teachers elected by the college, and 14 members appointed by the ontario minster of education. in both cases, more traditional issues, such as wages, continue to fall under collective bargaining and are separate from the work of these self-regulating bodies.
the canadian system is also internationally distinctive for its efforts to balance respect for diversity of language and religious affiliation with province-wide educational goals. for religion, Section 93 of the constitution act 1867 sought to protect parents’ rights to send their children to Protestant and catholic schools, subject to provincial control over funding and teachers, but using public funding. this structure means that these schools and school boards in canada are within the public system and under partial control of the ministry of education, not in the private sector. these schools were named “separate schools” in canada West and “dissentient” schools in canada east. there is variation across provinces in exactly how these arrangements have evolved; in some provinces – like alberta, ontario and Saskatchewan – separate public and dissentient schools exist; in others, like manitoba and British columbia, parents seeking a catholic or Protestant education have to send their children to private schools, though even these often receive some degree of public funding.
While initial struggles in canada were around religious differences, in more recent years language has shown greater salience. Section 23 of the canadian charter of rights and freedoms protects parents who speak a minority language (english or french), gives their children the right to receive primary and secondary instruction in their native language, and allows for the establishment of “minority language educational facilities,” if sufficient numbers warrant it. there has been some controversy over how many students speaking a minority language are required to invoke this right; in Quebec it has generally been interpreted to mean only one, whereas in nova Scotia one judge felt that 50 students were too few to justify the creation of a french school. courts have also had to adjudicate what it means to have “minority language educational facilities”, with some seeing that as requiring only separate francophone programmes within existing schools, whereas others judge it necessary to create separate francophone schools. the overall consequences of the protection of both language and religious rights is that in some provinces, such as ontario, as many as four separate systems of public schools can exist within one province (english, english catholic, french, french catholic).
Students in canada are grouped by ability in ways that are very similar to the united States’ system. elementary school-aged children are often placed in ability groups within heterogeneous classrooms. Students in secondary schools are placed into tracks or streams, based on perceived ability levels. most high schools have tracks such as general, advanced, vocational, or university entrance. these practices have faced criticism for not sufficiently challenging students in the lower tracks, but sorting by perceived ability persists.
the thumbnail history of canadian educational reform in the post-war period shares much in common with the united States and the rest of the industrialised world. Strong economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s, combined with increasing demand for schooling, led to rapidly increasing spending on schooling between 1950 and 1970, with much of the energy focused on school construction and teacher hiring. Because of the increased demand for teachers, teacher wages rose considerably over this period. Schools and teachers were given more autonomy over what to teach, and the inspection functions of provincial ministries were delimited or eliminated. at the same time, provinces were taking increasing financial responsibility for schooling: in 1950, localities paid 64% of the costs compared to 36% from the provinces, and by 1970 the ratio had largely reversed, with provinces paying 60% and localities 40%. By 1997, eight out of the ten provinces had taken total responsibility for funding. the structure of the canadian education system is lean and uniform, as shown in figure 3.1.
the post-war boom of the 1950s and 1960s gave way to hard economic times in the 1970s, and the final three decades of the 20th century saw canadian education seeking a way to cut costs while increasing educational outcomes. globalisation and the arrival of the knowledge economy increased the importance of schooling as a matter of economic competitiveness. a neoliberal emphasis on efficiency pervaded the system, and support for greater choice, growing support for private schools, and increased state accountability became the order of the day.
While all four leading provinces increased the role of centralised testing and curriculum planning in the 1980s and 1990s, some of these efforts combined greater centralised accountability with more school-level control, under a
“tight-loose” philosophy of school improvement.1 the emphasis on testing in canada was extensive compared to most european systems, but not nearly as prominent as in the united States.
• figure 3.1 •
Canada’s education system organisation
12 years 9 years +
College diploma (1 to 4 years)
Doctorate (3 years or more)
Master’s (1 to 3 years)
Apprenticeship Vocational &
Technical Training (1 to 4 years)
Pre-elementary Elementary (4 years)
Bachelor’s (3 to 4 years)
Secondary (4 years)
the first decade of the 21st century has seen a set of educational reforms which emphasise the centralised standards and assessments which also characterised the earlier reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. however, the new reforms include a strong effort to try to build capacity among teachers, and to generate teacher buy-in to the improvement strategy. While the earlier strategy of testing grew out of an increasing scepticism about the quality of education and a more general distrust of government, the new strategy seeks to address this distrust as a core problem and aims to generate a virtuous cycle of greater performance leading to higher levels of trust, which in turn generate more energy for continued improvement. this strategy is described in some detail below, taking the case of ontario. But first we discuss the factors behind canada’s general successful educational performance, and especially its success at educating and integrating its immigrant children.
Canadian SuCCeSS in eduCatiOn
When asked to explain canada’s strong nationwide PiSa results, several canadian officials and informed observers could only offer informed hunches, given the absence of any meaningful national government role in education.
these hunches fell generally into three categories: canadian culture; the canadian welfare state; and three policy-specific factors (teacher selectivity, equalised funding, and provincial curricula).
Cultural factors
in terms of culture, observers note that parents in canada are generally supportive of their children’s education and can be seen as an asset to the schools. comparative PiSa data on the leisure reading habits of canadian students suggest that canadian students are more likely than any other children in the world to read daily for pleasure (tibbetts, 2007). While culture is notoriously diffuse and difficult to measure, further exploration of its potential influence seems warranted because it could help to explain the similarity of results across provinces that differ in their educational strategies.
The welfare state
despite its provincial educational structure, canada does have a strong national welfare state, which was born of the crisis spurred by the great depression and which continued to grow in the 1960s. observers suggest that this has had two important educational consequences. first, children and their parents have access to national health insurance, and adults are protected from the vicissitudes of capitalism by a strong social safety net. While child poverty rates in canada are fairly high by international standards (canada had the 7th highest child poverty rate of 23 countries measured), variation across provinces in child poverty rates are correlated with PiSa outcomes (e.g. alberta has the lowest rate at 11.2% and the highest PiSa scores).
Second, the idea of a welfare state and a common good is much more firmly entrenched in canada than in its more individualistic neighbour to the south (the uS). the idea that health care and other social services are a right and not a privilege carries over into education, where there is a broadly-shared norm that society is collectively responsible for the educational welfare of all of its children. the combination of this norm with the protection afforded by the welfare state creates a climate in which school success is expected for all students. as harvard Professor richard elmore, who has worked for years with canadian schools, said during interviews for this report:
While the structure and artefacts of the canadian system look about the same as the american one (professional learning communities, resource rooms for data driven instruction), the culture in which this work takes place is entirely different. canadian teachers feel that the state has done its part by delivering the students to the schools ready to learn, and that they, in turn, have a deeply-felt obligation and responsibility to ensure that the students do indeed get educated. (interview conducted for this report)
Policy factors
in terms of policy, despite the lack of a national co-ordinating body, a number of respondents suggest that the provinces are quite similar in some of their key policies. the reason given was what scholars in other contexts have called “isomorphism”, or the desire to acquire legitimacy by becoming similar to other organisations. canada possesses a council of ministers of education (cmec), which is the forum through which the ministers of education in the respective provinces can meet for co-ordination purposes. While this body was consistently described as limited in its impact, because it acted only when all of the ministers agreed (infrequently), it does fulfil an important information-sharing function and enables good ideas and practices to spread across provincial lines.
neil guppy, a professor of sociology at the university of British columbia and author of a textbook on canadian education, put it this way during an interview for this report:
my own take is that autonomy is overblown – many of the textbooks used by the provinces are identical, our teacher education programs are very similar, the arrangements of schooling (kindergarten, elementary, middle, high) are very similar, unionisation is similar, school administration personnel shuffle between provinces with little problem, etc. to my knowledge all universities treat student grades from each province as substitutable even though we do not have Sat or national exams. imitation from, and monitoring of, other jurisdictions is high. in most english-speaking provinces you are likely to find as much variation between rural and urban as you are province to province. (interview conducted for this report)
three common policy factors (in addition to the welfare state and cultural reasons) were highlighted as potentially important to pan-canadian educational success:
• the establishment of province-wide curricula. these are developed by the respective ministries of education through a process of extensive consultation with groups of teachers and subject matter experts. in some provinces these curricula are fairly detailed, whereas in others they serve more as guidelines of what should be learned and when. While there is wide variation in the degree to which these curricula actually penetrate classroom practices, they do provide basic guidance as to what should be learned by which students at what ages. in recent years, some of the smaller provinces in the west have moved towards co-ordinating these efforts to establish greater uniformity across provinces, similar to consortia of states in the united States working together towards common core standards. recent PiSa results have shown that alberta is the highest-scoring province, and the alberta ministry ascribes this success in part to the quality of its curriculum.
• the high degree of selectivity in choosing teachers. the 2007 mcKinsey report on leading PiSa countries emphasised that one factor which differentiated PiSa leaders from those further down the chart was the degree to which teacher education programmes were able to draw their students from the top end of the talent pool (Barber and mourshed 2007). Ben levin, former deputy minister in ontario and a widely cited scholar on canadian education, said that canadian applicants to teachers colleges are in the “top 30%” of their college cohorts.
one canadian teacher interviewed explained that it was difficult to get into a teachers’ college in canada, although, as he pointed out, “everyone knew that there was a loophole – you could always cross the border to the united States. anyone can get credentialed there.” the education within these teacher training institutions is seen by some to be of high quality; levin estimates there are perhaps 50 institutions in all of canada, as opposed to hundreds across the united States, which allows for greater monitoring of training quality. other respondents agreed that teacher selectivity was high, but were more sceptical of the quality of the training institutions.
• equalised funding. Because funding has shifted entirely or almost entirely to the province level, the provinces are able to provide funding to offset the greater neediness of some of their students. funding from the provinces to districts is generally split into three categories: block grants based on number of students; categorical grants which are either used to fund particular programmatic needs (e.g. special education) or to help districts meet specific challenges in providing basic services (e.g. more remote districts need more funds for transportation); and equalisation funding, which is used in the districts that retain some local funding to equalise the poorer districts.
these factors represent the views of a small sample of canadian officials and observers (see interviewee list at end of chapter) about how they understand their own success. however, there is clearly more research and analysis needed. there are many countries and states/provinces elsewhere that have centralised curricula without yielding these kinds of results. there is also an extensive literature debating the importance of funding, which broadly suggests that money can help, but that it all depends on how it is spent. the teacher selectivity argument carries more weight because it is one of the few factors that more generally differentiates PiSa leaders from the rest. in
these factors represent the views of a small sample of canadian officials and observers (see interviewee list at end of chapter) about how they understand their own success. however, there is clearly more research and analysis needed. there are many countries and states/provinces elsewhere that have centralised curricula without yielding these kinds of results. there is also an extensive literature debating the importance of funding, which broadly suggests that money can help, but that it all depends on how it is spent. the teacher selectivity argument carries more weight because it is one of the few factors that more generally differentiates PiSa leaders from the rest. in